Google: Innovation Under Fire

A little competition can only encourage everyone to create better search tools.

You'd think everyone would love Google. Its fast, accurate results and quick-loading pages have made it the most popular search engine on the Web. Yet suddenly, everyone seems to be gunning for it. Yahoo! and MSN are introducing new search engines, which add more content or have new algorithms. At the same time, sites and services have emerged that try to defeat Google's PageRank system. To a large extent, that's the good news; a little competition can only encourage everyone to create better search tools.

But some of the criticism seems unfair. Lately, Google has been criticized for some of its search results. If you search for "Jew" you might see an anti-Semitic Web site at the top of the list. I hate that site, but I don't blame Google for its popularity.

Most recently, Google has been under fire because it plans to place ads in its upcoming Gmail mail service based on the content of mail messages. People are worried that the company will be reading their mail. I do worry about privacy, and it's important that the company has a tough privacy policy. But no matter which mail service you use, it's quite likely your mail is scanned by a computer anyway, searching for spam and viruses. Adding a relevant ad doesn't seem like a big step.

I've been testing out the service for the last couple of weeks, and so far I have to say its well-marked small text ads (see "Sponsored Links" in the screenshot) bother me a lot less than some of the larger ads I've seen at other free e-mail sites. And 1 GB of storage makes this a compelling offer. (I'm not sure about a mail service without user-defined folders; and until it's live, we won't know how well it handles spam.) I probably wouldn't use Gmail for confidential mail, and it would be good to be able to opt-out of scanning, perhaps in exchange for less space or a small fee. Overall, it's great to see innovation in Web mail. That's worth a cheer, not a complaint.

Michael J. Miller's Forward Thinking Blog: forwardthinking.pcmag.com
Michael J. Miller is chief information officer at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. From 1991 to 2005, Miller was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine, responsible for the editorial direction, quality and presentation of the world's largest computer publication.
Until late 2006, Miller was the Chief Content Officer for Ziff Davis Media, responsible for overseeing the editorial positions of Ziff Davis's magazines, websites, and events. As Editorial Director for Ziff Davis Publishing since 1997, Miller took an active role in...
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